Britain prepares for war

On 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, Britain was not yet formally at war. Neville Chamberlain’s government, together with France, demanded that Berlin withdraw its troops, but at home it was already behaving as if the war had begun. That morning full mobilisation of the navy, army and air force was ordered. At dawn the largest movement of population in British history got under way, known by the code name “Pied Piper”. In the evening the House of Commons voted a war credit and more than a dozen emergency bills within a few hours, and after sunset Britain’s cities were plunged into darkness. In the following days Parliament passed the National Registration Act (5 September) and the government created a Ministry of Food (8 September). All these steps had been in preparation for years, and what they had in common was the fear of bombs.

Fear of the bomber

Ever since the airship and bomber raids on London in 1915–1918, which killed some fifteen hundred civilians, British public opinion had lived with the vision of a war that would open with an air strike on the capital. In 1932 Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons that “the bomber will always get through”. In 1937 staff officers of the Committee of Imperial Defence estimated that in the first sixty days of a war German raids might kill some 600,000 people and injure 1.2 million. Images from Spain, above all the destruction of Guernica and later the bombing of Barcelona, seen in the newsreels, reinforced these fears. The planners feared not only casualties but also panic: as early as 1931 the committee studying evacuation wrote that its task was to prevent a “disorderly, general flight” of the population from London.

The Sudeten crisis in the autumn of 1938 was a dress rehearsal. Trenches were dug in the parks, gas masks were issued to the population, and some London schools prepared to leave. After Munich the government speeded up its preparations. A committee chaired by John Anderson drew up an evacuation plan: the country was divided into “evacuation”, “neutral” and “reception” areas, and in January and February 1939 spare rooms in homes in the provinces were surveyed. Anderson, from November 1938 the minister responsible for civil defence, also gave his name to the corrugated-iron garden shelters distributed to residents of threatened districts.

In the spring of 1939, after the occupation of Bohemia and the guarantee to Poland, preparations extended to the armed forces. The Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, pushed through the doubling of the Territorial Army in March and, in May, the Military Training Act – the first peacetime conscription in British history. Men aged twenty were to undergo six months’ training, and the first “militiamen” reported to their units in July. On 24 August, the day after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Parliament passed the Emergency Powers Act, and London teachers were called back by radio from their holidays to return to their schools.

Mobilisation

On the morning of 1 September the government decided that the time had come to set in motion the last and most costly stages of its plans. At a meeting of the Privy Council King George VI signed the proclamations calling out the reserves, and the service ministries sent out their orders: the Admiralty to the fleet, Kingsley Wood’s Air Ministry to the Royal Air Force, and Hore-Belisha’s War Office to the army. In the evening Chamberlain told the House of Commons: “This morning we ordered complete mobilisation of the whole of the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force.” Some of the measures had been taken the day before, and the fleet had in practice been at readiness since the end of August.

British mobilisation was unlike French or German mobilisation. Britain had no army of millions to be assembled from the reserves in a few days. Calling up the reservists and embodying the Territorial Army yielded a few hundred thousand soldiers, from whom divisions ready to be sent to the Continent still had to be built. The real effort was only beginning: on 3 September, the day war was declared, Parliament passed the National Service Act, which made men aged 18 to 41 liable for military service. The first units of the British Expeditionary Force began crossing to France in the days that followed.

The war credit and the emergency acts

The evening sitting of the House of Commons on 1 September is remembered above all as the day Chamberlain announced that a final warning had been sent to Berlin. That same evening, however, the members also dealt with money and law. At 6.51 p.m. the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Simon, moved an extraordinary Vote of Credit of up to £500 million for the financial year ending 31 March 1940, “for securing the public safety, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of public order and the efficient prosecution of any war in which His Majesty may be engaged”. Simon explained that a war credit had to be framed in general terms, as giving details of plans was not in the public interest. The Labour member Frederick Pethick-Lawrence asked whether, as in 1914, the government would shortly introduce a new budget with new taxes. Simon replied that it probably would. The motion was agreed without a division, and immediately afterwards a bill was passed authorising the issue of that sum from the Consolidated Fund.

This was not yet a war budget in the strict sense, but an extraordinary authorisation for expenditure beyond the estimates already approved. Simon presented the real war budget on 27 September: he raised income tax to 7s 6d in the pound, that is, to 37.5 per cent. That same evening of 1 September Parliament passed a series of bills that had been prepared in advance in ministry drawers: on prize law, on exchange control, on import and export control, on rents and compensation for war damage, on regional commissioners, who were to take over authority in their regions should communications with London be cut, and on the conditions of service in the armed forces.

The Pied Piper

The evacuation began early on the morning of 1 September, before war had been declared. The government judged that starting it too early would cause discontent, but starting too late would expose people to the first air raids, which were expected immediately. From the evacuation areas – above all London, but also Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Portsmouth and other industrial cities and ports – schoolchildren in groups with their teachers, mothers with children under five, pregnant women, and blind and disabled people were taken away by train, by bus and sometimes by ship. Each child had a name label, a gas mask in a cardboard box and a suitcase or a bundle.

In the first few days of September, according to the figures of the historian Richard Titmuss, some 1,473,000 people were moved in England and Wales under the government scheme. Among them were nearly 827,000 unaccompanied children, about 524,000 mothers with small children, almost 13,000 pregnant women, several thousand blind and disabled people, and more than 100,000 teachers and helpers. In Scotland, according to a contemporary study, about 176,000 people were evacuated. To these must be added those who left on their own initiative, to relatives or to hotels in the provinces; their number is estimated at about two million, many of them before 1 September.

The operation was uneven. Transport worked smoothly, but the placing of people was often chaotic: some districts received several times more newcomers than expected, while others waited in vain. At the reception centres hosts picked their charges, something evacuees sometimes remembered as a “slave market”. The meeting of two worlds came as a shock to both sides: well-to-do families in the provinces saw at close quarters, for the first time, the poverty of children from the working-class districts of the big cities, undernourished and sometimes lice-ridden, while city children found themselves in houses without electricity or running water. Participation in the scheme was voluntary and lower than expected: according to Titmuss, about 46 per cent of eligible children left in England, and 38 per cent in Scotland.

The blackout

On the evening of 1 September the blackout came into force. After dark every window and every door had to be covered so that not a ray of light escaped outside. Street lamps were switched off or shaded, and car headlamps and traffic lights were fitted with slotted masks. Compliance was enforced by Air Raid Precautions (ARP) volunteers, whose cry of “Put that light out!” became one of the symbols of wartime daily life. That same day BBC television, which had been broadcasting a regular service in the London area, went off the air, since its transmitter could have served German airmen as a radio beacon; it did not return until June 1946. Radio merged the regional programmes into a single national service.

The blackout became one of the most irksome aspects of the war for the British, especially as for many months not a single bomb fell on Britain. The number of fatal road accidents rose sharply – according to contemporary statistics, in some months of the autumn of 1939 it was almost double that of the year before – and the government had to relax some of the rules and lower the speed limit. Crime also flourished in the darkness. The blackout was eased only in September 1944 and lifted entirely in the spring of 1945.

Britain was not alone. On 1 September a blackout was ordered throughout the Reich, under air-raid protection regulations prepared as early as May 1939. It was also introduced in France along with mobilisation, and from then on Paris, the “City of Light”, was plunged into darkness at night.

The fear of air raids had a grim and less well-known side as well. In the first days of September owners, prompted by government leaflets and by fear that they would be unable to feed their animals in wartime, had hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats put down – by some estimates as many as 750,000. Queues formed outside veterinary surgeries and animal shelters.

The population register and the Ministry of Food

On 5 September, two days after war was declared, Parliament passed the National Registration Act. The last census had been taken in 1931, and mobilisation and evacuation had moved millions of people; the state needed precise knowledge of who lived where and what they did, in order to plan conscription, the allocation of labour and the expected rationing of food. On Friday 29 September every household filled in a form with the names, dates of birth, occupations and marital status of everyone living there, and in the following days enumerators handed each person an identity card. Some 45 million were issued. The British had to carry them and produce them at the request of the police, something previously unknown in Britain. The requirement was abolished only in February 1952.

On 8 September the Ministry of Food was created. Britain imported about two-thirds of the food it ate, so German submarines could starve it, as they had tried to do in 1917–1918. The new ministry, formed out of a department of the Board of Trade that had been preparing since 1937, took over the purchase, import and distribution of the main foodstuffs, and once registration was complete it issued ration books. Rationing, however, was introduced cautiously: ration coupons for bacon, ham, butter and sugar came into force only on 8 January 1940, and for meat in March 1940.

Significance

The first week of September showed that Britain was entering the war differently from 1914. Then, for many months, people had believed it would be “business as usual”, and conscription was introduced only in 1916. Now, from the first day, the state assumed full power over its citizens: it moved them, blacked out their homes, registered them, and would soon be calling them up and rationing their food. For the most part society accepted this without protest.

But the bombs did not fall. During the first months of the Phoney War the Luftwaffe did not attack British cities, and the evacuees began to return home: by January 1940 more than half of them had gone back, and the great majority of mothers with small children. When the raids came in 1940, the evacuation had to be repeated. The register of 29 September served until the end of the war as the basis for conscription and rationing, and after the war it became the basis for patient numbers in the British National Health Service. Some historians regard the experience of evacuation, which showed prosperous England the scale of poverty in its cities, as one of the impulses behind the social reforms from which the British welfare state grew after 1945.